Grace under fire

Central Market, under construction in Abu Dhabi, has won an award for site safety, an accolade partly put down to incessant training and tool box talk

“It’s all about training and tool boxes. We tool box and tool box and tool box them,” continues Bottomley. “Every Saturday morning at eight o’clock, the foremen deliver talks on a topic of their choice. There are 16 members of the safety team working here on Central Market, all of them speak both English and Asian languages.”

All of the HSE guys accompanying me today – Aldar’s head of HSE Andrew Broderick, Aldar HSE executive Reju Jose Manjooran and ACC project manager Pierce O’Donnell are also lending their expertise to the site visit – have horror stories to tell about the state of sites and workers when they first arrived in the Middle East.

The battle, they claim, has been to completely change the safety culture. It’s a fight they seem to have won; when the Ministry of Labour visited the Central Market site last month, they didn’t find a single worker lacking the suitable PPE.

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As we make our way to the workers’ carriage elevator, Aldar’s top health and safety man, Broderick, points out the unit where chemicals and flammables are stored securely and, most importantly, away from the towers.

Flammable materials being kept on-site, along with sparks produced by hot works, are the major causes of fires on construction sites, explains O’Donnell.

“The containers are well-protected and workers take up flammables on a daily basis,” he explains. “One of the challenges in promoting HSE on-site here is obviously communication, due to unskilled workers coming from so many places, but, compared to my experience doing this in the UK, in some ways it’s easier. Workers here have yet to acquire any bad habits. You tell them once and they listen.”

We all step into the lift and are quickly rewarded with a stunning view over Abu Dhabi as we climb to the 67th floor.

“You’ll notice we keep slabs extremely clean,” says ACC’s Bottomley. “It’s a simple thing but effective at reducing risk quickly.”

Stepping out onto the slab, he points out the safety features present on every floor throughout the entire construction process.

Each level has a fire hose with a length sufficient for reaching all areas of the floor; there’s a fire alarm button too, while all cradles also have a button so that operators can sound the alarm if they observe a fire.

In each stairwell there are site plans, showing workers exactly where they need to go in the event of an incident, as well as all relevant contact numbers. Fire action and first aid notices appear on the walls in English, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and Bengali. Staircases between floors also all feature emergency lighting throughout the construction process.